Big Woods

by May Cobb

  He crossed the stage and sat on the throne and Jess and Sara and three other girls surrounded him. They took out a huge goblet full of red liquid and poured it down his throat, splashing it everywhere. He stood up and shook it off like a wet dog and was lip-synching again about Hell and sinners.

  And then he shouted the next part along with the crowd. Something about sex before marriage, and everybody was screaming so I could hardly understand the words. And then Sara straddled him on the throne and was moving up and down on him, her black cape covering everything.

  Nicolette was wide-eyed, leaning back into Damien who cradled her from behind, his arms crossed over her chest in a protective X.

  I saw Rain make some sort of hand signal and I watched as Sara, Jess, and another guy followed him over to the tree line where they cranked up two four-wheelers and took off.

  “I’ve gotta go pee,” I lied to Nicolette and headed for the woods, following Rain and the others.

  Away from the bonfire and the strobe lights, I could see the tail lights of the four wheelers and I ran along the edge of the trees, trying to catch up to them. My backpack slammed against my back and my heart was beating so fast it hurt. I ran as fast as I could before I finally had to stop and double over to catch my breath. I could still hear the engine of the four wheelers whining, so I walked as quickly as I could down the path. The moon was still high but the trees were beginning to thicken again, smothering the light and making the path dark.

  I kept walking until the music was just a muffled thump, but then the sound of the four wheelers had fizzled out and all I could hear was the night sounds of the forest: tree frogs croaking, night birds in flight, and the wind brushing through the pine trees. The path curved and I looked back but couldn’t see the clearing anymore. Up ahead, a wispy smokestack was curling toward the moon and I decided to follow it, hoping that’s where they were headed.

  Behind me, I thought I heard a branch snap, but when I turned around, there was nothing there. I pulled the cuff back on my blue jean jacket and twisted Lucy’s bracelet on my wrist and said out loud to her as if she were there, “I’m going to find you, Lucy. Hold on, I’m on my way.” I picked up the pace again until my foot caught on a gnarled tree root and my palms planted in the red dirt. I scrambled up and wiped off my palms on my jeans, and felt tears spring to my eyes, but I brushed them away and kept marching. Now the moon had nearly set and it was even darker, and my own breath was starting to sound like somebody else’s. I started doing our chant, “Christmas, Easter, Happy Times, Christmas, Easter, Happy Times” until it calmed me. It worked every time.

  The smokestack seemed to be coming from my right, and shortly, I came upon a small gravel road and turned down it, hoping it would lead me there. Along the road there was a creaking gas well with a small light and that made me feel less afraid. I was getting closer to the gas well when I suddenly stopped and heard gravel crunching behind me. Blind, white-hot fear shot through me and I spun around with my fists up, my heart piercing my chest. I shouted, “What the fuck do you want from me!!!!”

  The figure stopped, too, but then my whole body sighed as I saw his palms, Nick’s palms, up in surrender.

  “Nick, what the hell?” I said, breathless.

  “I didn’t mean to scare you … and I didn’t want to intrude,” he said, coming closer. “But I saw you leave the bonfire and thought I should follow you.” He took off his kelly-green letter jacket and spread it out on the ground. “Come, sit,” he said.

  “But I’m trying to follow Rain,” I said.

  “They’re long gone,” he said, shaking his head, “trust me. Here, share this with me,” he said, offering me a sip out of his flask.

  The ground was cold, so cold that it reminded me of the cheap window unit in a dingy motel I had once stayed in on the Mississippi coast with my parents and Lucy. We were sunburned and that made the A/C seem even crueler. I leaned back on his jacket and soon we were both laying there, staring up at the sky, Nick lazily smoking a cigarette.

  “How do you even know them?” I asked, too embarrassed to tell him much more. He just looked at me and took another drag off his cigarette and blew smoke rings up in the air. We lay there shifting on top of the leaves. It was good to be next to Nick. He radiated warmth and I pushed the question out from the top of my stomach through my mouth.

  “So they’re like a cult? They’re Satanists?” I asked, the word coming out as a nasty hiss. Nick looked up at the sky and blew out a deep sigh. “Well, tell me, please,” I begged.

  He turned to look at me and brushed a finger across my lips and called me by the nickname he’d given me when I was little. “Be careful, butterfly,” he said, his cat-green eyes bloodshot. “They’re weird, I’ll give you that, but they aren’t devil worshippers. And they didn’t kidnap Lucy. But you shouldn’t be out here alone.”

  Of course Nicolette had told him everything; I was embarrassed that I didn’t already know that.

  His breath was hot on my face, and it smelled like I imagined how marijuana smells. I wanted to believe him, but I didn’t know what I believed anymore.

  Nick dropped me off at the bottom of the driveway, but I guess Mom and Dad heard his car pull away because as I was walking up the drive, the porch lights clicked on, flooding the front yard. They came scrambling out onto the front steps. They looked all around before grabbing me and yanking me into the house. I wouldn’t look at them.

  “Where have you been?” Mom asked, her voice sounding like the high end of a piano.

  “Um, I don’t know, just out, okay?” I could still feel the alcohol in my system and it made me adopt a bitchy teenager-speak that I’d only seen on television. I’d never talked to my parents this way before; it felt cruel.

  I tried to walk past them, but Dad grabbed my arm, twisting me back around. “Leah, answer your mother!”

  “I was in Big Woods,” I spat out at them, still in full character. “I was with Nick and Nicolette—it was just a party. It’s so not a big deal. I’m home safe now! Isn’t that all you care about?” I said, trembling.

  “Goddamit, Leah! What in the hell’s gotten into you?” Dad barked at me.

  “What’s the matter with you guys?” I screeched back. “Lucy is out there, somewhere, and y’all are just sitting around not doing a damn thing about it!” I was becoming hysterical and could feel a tidal wave of sobs coming on, so I pushed past my parents and tore upstairs.

  “You’re grounded, Leah Elizabeth Spencer!” Mom shouted after me.

  “Yeah, really? Till when?” I shouted. I couldn’t seem to shake the attitude.

  “Until I don’t know when,” she shouted back.

  “And your mother and I are gonna have to decide if you’re really ready for your own car and your hardship license. Keep this up and the answer’s gonna be no!” I could hear Dad shaking as he said this, struggling to gain the power back.

  Even though I’m under the covers, I can’t stop shaking. I can’t stop seeing Rain’s eyes on me—the way he stared straight at me. I try to push his face out of my mind and try to see Lucy’s face instead. Lately, I can’t picture Lucy at ten for some reason, I can only see her as the five-year-old Lucy—smaller, tender, more childlike. I can imagine her warm hands on my arm and the way she used to pull me around the house to participate in whatever activity was delighting her. I can feel her hair tickle my cheek like it used to when she’d pounce on top of me in bed at night, trying to scare me before climbing in next to me and making me rub her back until she fell asleep. Heat rises in the back of my throat and I can’t stop the sobs. Everything I’ve felt since she’s been gone is gushing out. My whole body shakes with the sobs—grief really is like a wave, it’s not something that people just say—and I cry and cry and cry until I’m emptied out and I fall asleep and hope that my dreams take me to her.

  47

  Sylvia

  On Frida
y night—what would be Delia’s last night with me at the hospital—she sprang up in bed and asked for a piece of paper. I tore off a sheet from my notepad and gave her a pen and watched as she drew, her face crimped with concentration. When she was finished and certain that all the details were there, she passed it to me. It was a map of the cemetery, with road signs, landmarks, etc. I nodded and folded it neatly into a tight square and put it in the pocket of my winter coat where I would keep it for years.

  Over the weekend, at home, I thought about what I would do next. I went upstairs to the second story and eyed the spare bedroom. I threw open the sash, letting sunlight wash over the modest, wooden bed dressed with a red and white quilt, and I thought—with new sheets from Penny’s and a few other touches—the room could do for Delia.

  She could stay with me for a little while until I figured out what to do next. We could get her on her feet and she could either go and stay with my sister, Evelyn, for a bit, or maybe I could help her apply to a community college in Dallas. Anything to get her out of this hellhole.

  And in the meantime, I could go quietly to the Longview police with her story, have them open an investigation and hopefully find and save the other women.

  As I fixed myself dinner that night—a roasted chicken with potatoes—I thought about what I would say to Dr. Marshall, how I could persuade him to go along with my plan. And smiling inside, I pictured telling Delia my plan, and then seeing the look of relief wash over her face.

  I would explain things to her on Monday, now that she was stable and clear. I would explain that she needed to act sane in front of Dr. Marshall, that she needed to request a re-evaluation, that she needed to confess that she simply had made the whole story up, that she was really on the run from her abusive boyfriend.

  On Monday night, I walked down the hall, my heart bursting with the news I was going to give to Delia, but when I got to her room, she was gone. The door was ajar and the lights were on—loud and bright—and the janitor was in there stripping her bed and mopping the floor. My heart started racing, I went out into the hallway and Hattie grabbed me by the hand and led me to an empty break room.

  “Sylv,” she said, not wanting to meet my eyes. “They discharged her over the weekend.”

  “Who? Who authorized this? Where is she?” My voice was screechy.

  “I know, I know,” Hattie said. “Apparently, Dr. Marshall discharged her back to the police. They picked her up Saturday night. Said they had located some of her family in Arkansas—family that had been looking for her, an aunt or uncle or something—and that they were going to take her to them. Dr. Marshall signed off on it—”

  “Which police?” I stood there shaking, adrenaline spiking through my body, my mouth going dry.

  “I don’t know,” Hattie said. “It’s not written down in her chart.” She grabbed both of my wrists and guided me to a hard, plastic bench in the corner and made me sit down with her. “Look here, calm down,” she said, her eyes fixing me with a steady gaze. “Let’s not think the worst. Maybe she really does have some family that we don’t know about, maybe it’s—”

  But I stood up and tore away from her and pounded down the hall to the nurse’s station, where I grabbed the phone and paged Dr. Marshall with an emergency code.

  48

  Leah

  Friday, November 17th, 1989

  Lucy missing 7 weeks

  The day after the full moon party, Nicolette and I met at her locker just before second period. We let the second bell ring and made sure the halls had emptied out so we could talk in private.

  “I heard my mom called your parents. I’m so sorry,” I said.

  “Yeah, I’m grounded until Friday. But no biggie. You?”

  “I’m grounded for almost a month, till my birthday,” I said.

  “Jesus, Leah! That really sucks.” We both had bags under our eyes from staying up late the night before and Nicolette’s skin almost looked sickly green in the dingy light. “So, that Rain guy totally creeped me out,” she said, her eyes darting from side to side. “I mean, even Damien was spooked. We stayed on the phone with each other until we fell asleep last night.”

  We were trying to keep our voices down, but our whispers bounced back at us from the hard, cold floor, crisp and loud. “I mean, what were they even doing out there? And where do you think they went when they left on the four-wheelers?”

  Just then we heard a locker door slam and we both jumped. The noise was close by, maybe one row over, followed by the click, click, clicking sound of someone approaching us. I smelled cigarette smoke and looked up to see Rain walking toward us. He shook back his blond hair and looked us both over for a second, but then his eyes drilled on mine. He fixed me with that same stare from the night before—like he’d caught me doing something—his mouth curled in a dismissive smirk. I stood there frozen in place, staring back at him until he brushed passed us, flinging his cigarette onto the floor and grinding it out with his black hobnail boot.

  After lunch that day, Ashley Crawford, a popular, bubbly junior opened her locker and found a bouquet of shriveled black roses.

  It might sound weird, but when I heard that, I wished that I had blond hair and blue eyes so I could wait at my locker to catch Rain putting in the roses.

  It’s Friday night tonight, but since I’m grounded, I’m at home in the living room sitting cross-legged on the couch in my sweatpants with a metal bowl of popcorn resting on my knees. Ever since Monday night, Dad’s been staying at the office again. I’m sure it has everything to do with the stunt I pulled, going out to Big Woods. My stomach churns when I think that he’s left us again and what it’s doing to Mom, but I’m not going to stop looking for Lucy.

  Mom and I have barely spoken, but earlier tonight she plopped down next to me on the couch and put her feet up on the coffee table. I tilted the popcorn bowl toward her and she scooted closer next me, her hand grazing mine as she fished some out of the bowl. I rested my head on her shoulder and let out a deep breath I hadn’t noticed I was holding.

  She found the clicker behind a cushion and turned on the television. She was flipping through the stations when Lucy’s name flashed across the bottom of the screen. We both sat up and Mom grabbed my hand, squeezing it hard. It was the six o’clock news, and the banner at the bottom of the screen read: Local Church Honors Missing Girl, Lucy Spencer, with Candlelight Vigil. Mom hurriedly punched the chunky volume control on the clicker, turning up the sound.

  A reporter—a pert woman with a polished smile—was standing outside of East Texas Methodist. It was Ali’s candlelight vigil. I’d completely forgotten about it.

  “Tonight we bring you a story that many in this community have been following for the past few months. Seven weeks ago today, a local girl, Lucy Spencer, ten, went missing here in Longview while she was walking to catch the bus for school.”

  Snow flurries pelted her face and coated her dark bob like lice. She batted them away while she spoke. “Well, tonight, the good folks at East Texas Methodist are remembering this sweet little girl with a candlelight vigil.” The crowd was large—possibly hundreds of people swaying behind her, wrapped up in winter coats and clutching lit candlesticks.

  I heard her before I saw her: Ali’s cheerleader voice, high and shrill, coming from behind a poster that read “CHRISTIAN YOUTH AGAINST SATANISM.” She’d found the camera and made sure to pass behind the reporter.

  “Hi dear,” the reporter purred. “What can you tell us about your poster there?”

  Ali was grinning ear to ear and she set down the poster so the camera could capture her full-on. She was wearing a navy blue sweatshirt that said: FIND LUCY.

  “Well, we are all gathered here tonight to remember little Lucy Spencer, who’s actually my close friend’s sister.” I cringed. I knew she’d find a way to own Lucy. “And anyway, we’re afraid that Lucy might’ve been taken by a cult, like all those
other children were.”

  Pastor Mike had saddled up right next to Ali and was beaming at her as if she was his wife running for election. He took the microphone from her and started talking. “We know that our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ will stamp out this evil!” The masses behind him shouted, “Amen! Amen to that!” He nodded quickly and raised his hand to quiet the crowd. “He will banish this darkness! He is the light and the way and we stand up here tonight to bear witness to His greatness!”

  The reporter snatched the microphone back, trying to regain control of the coverage. “What are you trying to accomplish here tonight, Pastor?” she asked.

  “Well, many things!” he spit-shouted at her. “We want to help find Lucy, of course, bring her home safe. And we’re also excited about something our own Ali here is doing. She and her Mom are starting a petition to ban MTV from Longview.”

  The reporter looked baffled and was about to say something, but he steamrolled over her. “We know that some of the music on that station is the work of the devil. We already know the effect it’s already had on some of our youth here and we need to stamp it out! We’ve already got eleven hundred signatures from folks here tonight and we’re asking that your viewers stop by the church to add their names to the petition.” He continued on, but I had stopped listening. It wasn’t even about Lucy anymore. I could feel Mom shuddering—the more hysterical the religious stuff, the more it grated on her nerves.

  Mom stood up and clicked off the TV. “I can’t watch this garbage anymore,” she said and stormed out of the room.

  I went upstairs and climbed into bed. I couldn’t get over the way Pastor Mike was gushing about Ali, that gleam in his eye. He even put his arm around her like she was his girlfriend—it made a pit form in my stomach. And without even thinking about it, I found myself flipping to the back of my diary and under Rain’s name as a suspect, I scrawled down Pastor Mike Timmons.